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I'm not Canadian so I don't know what Track 2 means and who uses it. I askee Chat GPT and it tells me it's for people who aren't dying but have serious decline in their ability to function and that ~50% are people with degenerative neurological conditions, and that the median age in 2024 was 75. I had a close friend and roommate whose dad died slowly of Alzheimer's, it was awful. I don't think people with degenerative neurological disease ending their lives on their own terms is a problem.
Now okay so there's still a pretty big other category that seems to be a bunch of musculoskeletal issues, chronic pain, etc. Maybe there's a bunch of young healthy people in that bundle and I would find it if I dug through it but I'm not Canadian and I don't have that much time on my hands.
But we've done a second round of you telling me "a large number of people are using MAID, this is concerning" and then I get one piece of additional contextual information and it turns out I'm actually completely fine with the relevant use case. I think I'm now more likely to ignore anti-MAID people in the future because while you may raise issues about the possibility of bad social norms pushing relatively functional elderly folks to suicide (which seems a plausible concern to me) you keep scaremongering using numbers that include cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients ending their lives on their own terms. So I don't think you are actually responding to the first signs of a bad equilibrium taking shape. I think you probably have an eccentric moral framework where people with terminal cancer dying on their own terms is bad and you're using our shared concerns about the long term formation of bad social norms to try to get me to oppose what I think are perfectly reasonable MAID cases.
But that is the exact problem: the Track 1 cases are being used as the stalking horse for Track 2. While Track 2 might be confined for now to Alzheimer's etc. there's nothing saying it will remain confined to such cases. March 2027 is the first permissible time to start trying to expand Track 2 to mental health disorders.
And while it's only 4.4% now, what will it be in future? Will it creep up as it becomes more acceptable and more available and people become more aware they can avail of it? Will mental health disorders like chronic depression be included in the name of compassion?
If MAID was only "people terminally ill who are going to die soon and painfully", there would be less concern. But it's not, and has not been from the start, and once the camel gets its nose into the tent, at what point do you tell the camel to stop moving it? It's only the head now. It's only the neck now.
Yes, I agree that could happen (but it also could not). What I am asking is that anti-MAID people present statistical evidence that this is beginning to happen, not just point out that we could in theory slide down a slippery slope, and then state that the total number of MAID cases is increasing without making any attempt to separate out "terminal cancer patient dies painlessly" from "healthy 25 year old with depression".
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